How an Instagram Post Launched the World’s Most Unlikely Archive (Utah State University’s Outdoor Recreation History Collection)

From The Deseret News:

Abercrombie & Fitch might be best known today for its casual 20-something clothing, as it transitioned away from teen wear and provocative ads a decade ago.

But that might not be the most dramatic change the company has undergone in its long history.

In fact, when camper, hunter and fisherman David T. Abercrombie founded the store in Manhattan in 1892, he dubbed it the “greatest sporting goods company in the world.” Its 12-story building on Madison Avenue featured a rooftop fishing pond, basement shooting range and packing services for global expeditions. Customers included the adventurous Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway and Amelia Earhart.

Abercrombie published a digest-sized catalog showcasing the store’s high-end camping, hunting and fishing gear in 1903.

Utah State University has an original copy in its vast Outdoor Recreation Archive, the world’s greatest collection of outdoor gear catalogs, photographs, periodicals and audiovisual materials documenting more than a century of outdoor industry history. The Abercrombie catalog is one of the oldest and most surprising items among the thousands upon thousands stored in the Merrill-Cazier Library on campus.

Clint Pumphrey, manuscript curator for Special Collections and Archives, and Chase Anderson, industry relations manager for the Outdoor Product Design & Development program, started the project in 2018 with 1,200 catalogs from collectors in California who kept every one they received in the mail from the 1960s to the 2010s. The idea was to make them available for students in the outdoor products design program.

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The Instagram account, outdoorrecarchive, has amassed a global audience and nearly 53,000 followers, second only to the university’s general account and surpassing both the football and men’s basketball teams.

They’re always looking to acquire new items. A whiteboard in their office lists at least 50 names of people who have expressed interest or are in the process of donating.

“Because no one else in the world that we are aware of is doing this, no other institution, it’s really fertile ground to collect and preserve,” Anderson said. “No one else has done this work of gathering the documents and preserving the stories. So there’s a lot to uncover still.”

Last month, Anderson and Pumphrey received the Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award from the Society of American Archivists for building the Outdoor Recreation Archive.

Learn More, Read the Complete Article (about 2000 words)

Direct to the Outdoor Recreation Archive

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Awards, Libraries, News